Customer service management: Key benefits and strategies

Companies are increasingly focusing on customer service, but many still struggle to meet evolving customer expectations. According to the Zendesk AI-Powered Customer Experience Trends Report 2024, 62 percent of customer experience (CX) leaders feel they are behind in providing more instant experiences that customers expect. This indicates that there’s a growing gap between what customers want and what companies deliver.

By using customer service management—a strategy that involves empowering agents and advocating for the customer—you and your support team will be well-positioned to meet buyer expectations and increase customer retention.

In this guide, you’ll learn:

• The importance of customer service management
• What are the benefits of customer service management?
• How to improve your customer service management
• Customer service management examples
• Frequently asked questions
• Bolster your customer service management strategy with the right tools

The importance of customer service management

It’s no secret that customer service has far-reaching effects on the customer journey. It’s important to emphasize customer service management so everyone in your organization aligns with the same goals. Uniform processes and directives prevent conflict between departments and lead to consistent service.

The intent isn’t to hold one department back or create hurdles. Instead, good customer service management can improve everyone’s success by delivering better service to customers.

What are the benefits of customer service management?

Customer service management delivers a range of benefits that go beyond just solving customer issues. Here are some of the most significant benefits that contribute to a more efficient and customer-focused business:

• Increased customer retention: Retaining customers is far more cost-effective than acquiring new ones. Through CSM, companies maintain close relationships with customers, identify potential churn risks early, and take proactive steps to prevent them, enhancing loyalty.
• Enhanced problem-solving efficiency: CSM systems offer streamlined workflows, allowing agents to resolve issues faster by centralizing all customer information. This reduces the back-and-forth and improves the overall customer experience. In fact, the Zendesk CX Trends Report found that a majority of customers report being frequently transferred to another agent or department on phone calls, a frustration that effective CSM can help eliminate.
• Strengthened brand reputation: A strong CSM framework helps build trust. Happy, well-supported customers are more likely to become brand advocates, enhancing your company’s reputation through positive reviews and word-of-mouth marketing.
• Data-driven insights: Modern CSM systems track and analyze customer interactions, providing customer success managers with valuable insights into consumer behavior, preferences, and satisfaction levels. Additionally, according to our CX Trends Report, 62 percent of agents agree that having access to data would help them personalize interactions and do their jobs better.
• Improved team performance: With a CSM plan, customer service managers can improve agent training, allocate fair workloads, and ensure the team receives the recognition it deserves.

The cumulative effect of these benefits is a stronger, more profitable business with loyal customers and engaged employees. However, realizing these benefits requires a strategic, systematic approach to customer service management.

How to improve your customer service management

Building customer loyalty and improving employee engagement with your customer service team takes continuous effort. A strong customer service management strategy should empower agents and adopt agile processes within your department. These tips cover how to achieve those goals.

Improve your customer service management strategy by implementing the following best practices.

1. Motivate your customer service team with goals and rewards

Showing appreciation and acknowledging accomplishments can lead to motivated, upbeat customer service representatives. We recommend you:

• Set achievable goals: Tie individual and team goals to company-wide customer service objectives. Use customer service KPIs—like Net Promoter Score® (NPS), average handle time, and satisfaction and quality assurance scores—to set targets for your team. This helps agents see how their work contributes to the bigger picture.
• Recognize and reward employees: Call center burnout is a big issue, but a little positive reinforcement can make a difference. Set up guidelines for how often you want to recognize your agents, and then make sure you identify remarkable achievements.
• Encourage peer recognition: Promote a culture of mutual praise. The Zendesk team uses Slack to give each other shoutouts. Sometimes, praise happens within a small group. Other times, it’s broadcasted to the entire company.
• Personalize rewards and recognition: Take the time to offer praise that appeals to each agent’s unique personality. For example, an extroverted employee might appreciate a special shoutout during a team meeting. A more private person, on the other hand, may find an old-fashioned thank-you note more meaningful.

Every company has a different culture, so be sure to customize your rewards for your workplace. Use our ideas as a starting point and experiment with what works best for your team.

2. Support your team with training and career development opportunities

Building and retaining a talented team should be a key component of any customer service management strategy. Strive to hire talented agents, but realize their development shouldn’t depend entirely on on-the-job experience.

To enhance customer service skills, create a customer service training plan that will help agents achieve the goals and objectives of their role. Then, provide access to valuable training resources, such as:

• Knowledge bases for self-guided learning
• Online courses that measure aptitude
• Workshops that review customer service best practices and let agents develop the right voice and tone
• Mentorships by senior members who can provide real-time guidance

Send agents to external conferences or certification courses to further develop their hard skills. You can fill in the gaps in your training program while improving your talent pool’s potential for upward mobility.

3. Support fast resolution times across multiple channels

Limiting communication channels with customers might simplify your agents’ jobs, but it will also create bottlenecks that lead to poor service. For example, if everyone needs to call customer support to resolve an issue, they’ll likely face long wait times. Having multiple channels improves response times and lets customers choose the medium that suits them best.

Enable omnichannel support in your customer service management process with:

• Live chat

• Social media messaging

• Emails

• Web calls

4. Innovate with AI and self-service

Artificial intelligence is not just a trend—our CX Trends Report found that 65 percent of CX leaders see it as a strategic necessity, rendering previous CX operations obsolete. AI can help lighten the load and provide customer insights in cost-effective ways:

• AI agents can personalize interactions, understand customer needs, connect to backend systems, and provide end-to-end resolutions while working autonomously or alongside human agents.
• AI-powered CX platforms can automate tasks, provide suggestions to agents, answer customer questions, and deliver personalized recommendations by analyzing customer data.
• Analytics software can detect patterns in customer behavior and predict future needs.
• Intelligent routing systems can direct requests to the right team based on agent skill and capacity as well as customer intent, sentiment, and language.
• Integrated phone support can transcribe, score, and summarize calls, flag customer conversations at risk of churn, and identify agent performance gaps, all in real time.

Customer self-service portals can also reduce ticket volume by empowering customers to find answers independently. Agents work together to publish help center articles and tutorials that provide customers with the information they need.

5. Personalize customer interactions

Most of us have experienced poor customer service where the agent knows little to nothing about our history with the company. It feels like they’re trying to end the interaction as quickly as possible—whether the result is successful or not.

According to our CX Trends Report, 43 percent of CX leaders believe personalized experiences will increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. Create customer profiles with purchase history and demographic details that your agents can reference so they can provide customer-oriented support. The customer will feel seen and understood, and your agents can use the information to improve resolutions and satisfaction.

6. Research customer experience successes

The importance of customer experience in a CSM strategy cannot be overstated.

The best CX places the customer at the center of every interaction. Companies that excel in CSM focus on removing barriers to entry, listening to customers, providing timely follow-up, and confirming resolution and satisfaction at the end of every interaction.

Look to industry leaders for inspiration and best practices. Explore webinars, industry reports, and case studies that highlight successful CX strategies across different sectors. Whether it’s how companies personalize support, leverage technology for better engagement, or streamline operations, these examples provide valuable insights to refine your own approach.

7. Gather real-time and historical insights

You can track and analyze every customer interaction with your company to look for ways to improve your service. Real-time monitoring lets managers sit in on conversations and immediately address any issues they witness.

With quality assurance (QA) tools like Zendesk QA, AI can evaluate all customer service interactions to flag problems and identify opportunities to improve support. By using AI-powered analytics, QA software can score conversations, identify gaps in training, and highlight performance trends, enabling managers to proactively address issues and coach agents effectively.

8. Establish a customer feedback loop

A customer feedback loop enables companies to improve based on user comments and suggestions. It enhances customer retention by allowing you to better meet customer needs and address issues before they get worse.

Provide customers with different channels for engagement and feedback. Use community forums, social media, and customer satisfaction surveys to understand their perspectives and get an idea of what you can improve.

One mistake companies make is implementing changes in response to customer feedback without following up on the results. Contact the customer to see if you improved the process or completely resolved the issue. You may need to investigate issues that weren’t resolved the first time.

Customer service management examples

Use these real-world customer service management examples for inspiration in implementing your own strategies.

Tile: Scaling customer support successfully

Tile is an electronics company that helps people locate important belongings. It started as a crowdfunding project in 2012 and quickly grew into a global presence, helping millions of consumers every day. That fast growth led to understandable growing pains, especially with customer support.

Tile began using the Zendesk Agent Workspace to gain some much-needed efficiency. Thanks in part to the tools and unified channels, Tile cut its ticket handling time by 40 percent. Additionally, customer wait time decreased by 28 percent.

Lovevery: Delivering personalized service

Lovevery is a subscription-based toy retailer that creates stage-based play essentials to help parents support their children’s learning. With such a meaningful mission, the company’s CX team knew it needed to do everything it could to keep customers happy and engaged.

By leveraging Zendesk for omnichannel support, Lovevery engages customers through live chat and email, ensuring real-time, meaningful interactions tailored to each family’s unique needs. Additionally, Lovevery offers specialized services, such as Disability Support, connecting families with experts through customized workflows.

This focus on personalization has resulted in a remarkable 93 percent CSAT and a 10-15 percent increase in agent productivity, reinforcing Lovevery’s commitment to serving each family with care and creating “magic” moments with customers.

Reverb: Getting proactive with self-service

Reverb is an online musical instrument store that helps musicians learn what gear they need to replicate the industry’s most iconic sounds. Its customer engagement department makes up about one-quarter of the company, but even with that labor force, it’s struggled to stay ahead of customer needs.

To meet its goals, Reverb began collecting back-end data and customizing its workflows based on the insights it learned. Once the company discovered where customers struggled the most, it created self-service features, like articles and FAQ pages, so customers could resolve smaller issues independently before contacting the support team.

Since Reverb implemented these practices, the number of contacts per agent decreased by 50 percent. Nearly 3,500 people use Reverb’s Web Widget each week, and only a fraction of them need help from an agent.

Frequently asked questions

Bolster your customer service management strategy with the right tools

Customer service management is difficult. Make it easier by equipping your support team with the right tools.

Zendesk offers a comprehensive suite of customer service solutions designed to streamline workflows, improve agent productivity, and enhance customer satisfaction. From a unified agent workspace to AI-powered automation and self-service options, Zendesk provides the tools to easily manage every interaction.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score, and NPS are registered trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.